“Murder, Hermansson. You know I count them. He’s my three hundred and tenth.”

Nothing could replace the rush.

Grens wasn’t even ashamed of it anymore, though he surely was in the beginning. That’s just how it was. How he was.

A murder investigation grabbed hold of him, lifted him up and pushed him on, gave him something to look forward to tomorrow. The meaning of death as a condition for the meaninglessness of life. Every time someone used violence to declare a person’s life less valuable than their own, the rush arrived just as strong, it welled up from deep inside and got him through his hellish nights. Sixty-four years old, stout, balding, and alone, or twenty-three years old, slender, strong, and in love, with his arm around his classmate—three hundred and ten times and still the feeling was the same. So long ago and yet somehow only a moment had passed. He remembered his first time, as a new recruit at the Uppsala Police Station, called to the scene where a husband had killed his wife. Grens, who had never seen a dead person before, parked his patrol car outside a mansion on Valsätra and followed his commanding officer through an unlocked door. The man was just sitting there at his kitchen table with his wife on the floor at his feet, a bloody ax sticking out of her back. Completely empty. That’s how Grens remembered the husband’s, the murderer’s eyes. A bottomless, wordless pit. The man didn’t protest as the officers pulled him away by his upper arm, and it was there, at that moment, the very first step toward the patrol car with his first murderer arrested that Ewert Grens felt it for the first time. The same rush that now filled this forty years’ older detective in a dim stairwell, and which meant he was slowly getting closer, closer. So distinctly different from that other emotion, the worst of them all, the one he connected to a hopping girl and being convinced he’d found a murderer and then having to meet that bastard’s scornful laugh as Grens was forced to let him go free.

“Ewert—I’d like to introduce you to some folks you should have met a while ago.”

Marina Hermansson grabbed his shirtsleeve and pulled him toward two very young people in uniform, who had the kind of clear eyes that only exist in those who’ve just started their journey.